To: Dad — Love Always, Lexiss #3
❝ rid of the monsters in your head, put all your faults to bed, you can be king again. ❞ — king, lauren aquilina
“A minute from home, but I feel so far from it. The death of my dog, the stretch of my skin… It’s all washing over me, I’m angry again.”
— Noah Kahan
Dear Dad,
When my grandma passed away, my mom recited a quote that she heard from a friend.
“Death has no respect for the living.”
It doesn’t care if it’s your birthday, your wedding, or your first competition in high school. It doesn’t care if the sun is shining on one of your most beautiful days. It doesn’t care if you’re experiencing something you’ve waited your entire life for. Death has no respect for the living, and time doesn’t stop because a piece of our world has.
Somehow, I’ve survived the last five years. In truth, I spent each year hoping I’d make it to the next. I nearly gave up during every single one. But, somehow, I’m still here. I’ve done things I wish he could’ve been a part of, and I’ve done things I’m grateful he’s not here to physically see. His passing taught me that the clock will continue ticking, annoyingly reminding me that more and more time stretches between us. More importantly, his death taught me that I am a wretched mirror of my parents.
My life maps out their past experiences they hoped to shield me from. I’ve learned to stare back kindly at the face that presents itself in the broken glass and speak words of affirmation to soothe their tears. Discovering the person that my father was makes me look up at the sky and curse him for not being able to guide me through the same things he went through.
I don’t know how my dad did it.
I don’t know how my dad survived thirty-six years of this. I don’t have him to tell me if he was terrified of his fate, knowing that he would pass a month before my own 15th birthday, as if passing the torch as well. I don’t know how he watched his widowed mother until the day she died. I don’t know how he was able to go on, get married, and have kids—If the idea of his dad not being there bothered him, even with how much he hated him. And I am forced to sit with these thoughts, his deafening silence filling every room I walk into.
Oddly enough, I know how I’ve done it, though.
The answer is simple: I preserved him. I found little similarities in our characters—Not just our stories. I studied who he was in his life and what he left in his passing. I took every memory I could recall and stowed them away between the pages of my books. My father exists in everything I do, from the scenes I write between my father-daughter duos to the face that looks back at me when I stare in the mirror. Our quirks, hyper-fixations, and one-sided dimples always remind me that he isn’t far just because he’s gone.
What scares me must’ve been what scared him too. Seeing so much of your father in yourself… Does that mean that I could possess his bad traits too? The ones that caused me so much pain in my life? Does that mean I could hurt others the way that he hurt me?
It’s hard to fathom the idea of that or to learn to accept that I’ll never escape the man my dad was, both good and bad.
But, as I looked back on the last five years, I was able to look back fondly. I discovered his ghost in me more times than I can count, and his presence pushed me to do things I was once afraid of doing. There were blessings to be counted although his death felt like a lifelong curse. The world was unkind, unfair, and unbearable, and I found that if I only focused on those things, that’s all the world would be.
Unkind, unfair, and unbearable.
So, to Dad, here are the ways the world was kind:
I’ve had the opportunity to be loved again and again, even when I lost it. Although you’re not here to experience it with me, I’ve traveled more since you passed than when you were alive. I learned that there will be more than one boy who will break your little girl’s heart besides you, but there will also be more than one boy who will love your princess—Just not as much as you. Tattoos are really cool and they hurt a little, but now, your memory is forever an artwork on my body. Mom still dresses me up like a little doll, and your disapproving face is always the first thing I think about. I didn’t understand your impact on others when you died, but now I see my own in the friends around me. It makes me want to cherish life a little longer.
And, the most important way the world was kind: People love your story. People are in love with the love story that is you and Mom. People love our story, even the moments that make them want to hate you a little too. It took me a while to learn that sometimes the villain of your story could also be the hero. I guess writing wasn’t the worst path, huh?
Yes, the world was unkind, unfair, and unbearable. But, through the hardships, I learned and began to believe that I could still make a beautiful life for myself even if I lost many years of it to grief. I could still live a life, a story worth telling, that would be different from my father. Perhaps, in every universe, I’m meant to lose my dad in some way, but his legacy lives on in the ways that I write him. Those archives serve as a reminder of who I want to be through what I don’t want in my life.
To be honest, my dad’s story instilled a lot of hope in me. He was a man that no one believed in, including myself.
My dad was a better father than his.
And I know this because he will never be a story I refuse to tell.
Even though he broke my heart a million times, there was so much evidence of love. That in itself is enough.
Love Always,
Lexiss
P.S. shave ice won’t taste the same without you. i’ll make sure to get mine snowcapped, just like you always liked it. oh, and happy birthday, old man.
“The things that I lost here, the people I knew. They got me surrounded for a mile or two. Left at the graveyard, I’m driving past ghosts […] I’m back between villages, and everything’s still.”
— Noah Kahan